Apple Watch might have actually saved the life of a 17-year old teen. The watch gave him persistently high reading, and the decision to seek medical attention because of these readings might just have saved his life. The teen in question is named Paul Houle who is a football player at Tabor Academy.

Paul, who had bought the watch just a few days ago, noticed that his heart was beating unusually fast even hours after football practice ended.

“It was the first day of pre-season,” he says. “The first practice was from 10 until 12 and the second practice was from 3 to 5. During my second practice, I started to have problems breathing and I had pain in my back, which turned out later to be my kidneys failing.”

Houle finished practice and went back to his dorm to take a nap. At 7:30 that evening, he went to a meeting for all the pre-season athletes, where he mentioned his elevated heart rate to Tabor head trainer Brian Torres.

“I didn’t think it was anything serious,” Houle says. “When I saw the trainer I just mentioned it to him, not expecting him to do much about it.”

Torres thought Houle’s Apple Watch must be wrong, so he took the teen’s heart rate manually. It was still 145 beats per minute.

Torres rushed Houle to the school’s health center, where nurse Elizabeth West confirmed that both his blood pressure and heart rate were too high. She called Houle’s father, Paul Houle, MD, a neurosurgeon at Cape Cod Healthcare.

They decided Houle needed to go to the emergency room. West drove him to Cape Cod Hospital herself, keeping a heart monitor on him to make sure he was OK.

“When I got there, they first tested me for a blood clot which they thought was in my leg and had traveled to my lung, but then they diagnosed me with rhabdomyolysis,” he says.

“The combination of how hot it was last week, the two football practices in one day and dehydration caused my muscles to start to break down and release a protein into my blood stream which shut down my heart, my liver and my kidneys.”

Rhabdomyolysis is a syndrome caused by muscle injury, says Craig Cornwall MD, the Cape Cod Hospital emergency room physician who treated Houle. “It happens for different reasons. It’s relatively frequent but for most of us it’s relatively mild.

“Paul’s case was a little unusual, but you do see it in athletes like the weekend warriors who do something extremely strenuous and their muscles aren’t used to it.”

In Houle’s case, the hot weather, the two football practices in one day and dehydration had started to break down his muscle tissue. That leads to the release of a muscle protein called myoglobin into the blood stream.

Rhabdomyolysis can lead to many complications, especially to the kidneys, which become overwhelmed and cannot remove the body waste and concentrated urine caused by myoglobin.

In extreme cases, a muscle will actually die, which can lead to amputation.

Houle stayed in the hospital for three days and could barely move. As of the writing of this story one week after the incident, he still had not been cleared to return to football practice. He still has trouble just walking across campus without getting winded and noticing a raised heart rate on his Apple Watch.

“At the hospital they told me that if I had gone to practice the next day that I would have lost all control of my muscles and there was a good chance I would have fallen down on the field and died right there,” he says. “I’m very grateful for that heart rate monitor.”